Raf Simons Salutes Robert Mapplethorpe, a Fellow Provocateur

FLORENCE, Italy — The doors had only just opened at the Stazione Leopolda, the decommissioned train station where Raf Simons held his spring men’s wear show, but already there was a throng inside. The music was pounding, and lights flashing, but when your eyes adjusted to the neon and then the dim, there they were: 266 mannequins wearing vintage Raf Simons, paired in groups or hanging over stairways like partygoers at a thumping club.

The clothes they wore were drawn from 20 years of his namesake men’s wear collection, but Mr. Simons didn’t care for the word “retrospective.”

Image

Mr. Simons, right, with Robert Sherman, one of Mapplethorpe’s subjects.CreditChris Warde-Jones for The New York Times

“I didn’t really want to work too much the way it’s usually done when you do a retrospective,” Mr. Simons said backstage after the show. “It doesn’t work for my brand; it’s a brand that needs to sit in reality. I don’t feel it as an installation.” He gestured at the mannequins, who were, he acknowledged with a shrug, all female: “They become kind of a crowd. They’re just a part of the audience.”

Where Mr. Simons goes, crowds follow. He uprooted his show from Paris, where it usually takes place, and moved it for a season to Pitti Uomo, the Florentine trade fair where, in 2005, he showed his 10th anniversary collection.

After two decades in the fashion business, Mr. Simons is at a transitional point in his career. In October, he stepped down from Dior, where he had been creative director of its women’s collection, and though rumors circulate freely, he has not yet announced where he will go next. (He and his representatives crisply declined to comment.)

For the first time in years, without the usual pressure of another brand to carry as well as his own (before Dior, he spent several years designing Jil Sander, which he also brought to Pitti Uomo, in 2010), he has a single focus: Raf Simons. On Thursday night, he staged his new collection for a gathering of men and mannequins, his critics and his own past work.

The new collection was made in collaboration with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, which reached out to him to explore a partnership two months ago.

It is a year of Mapplethorpe, as well as a year of Raf. Twin retrospectives of Mapplethorpe’s work are on view, following major Mapplethorpe Foundation gifts, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, one of Mr. Simons’s favorite cities; and a new documentary, “Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures,” aired on HBO earlier this year. So Mr. Simons shelved some early plans and set about incorporating Mapplethorpe’s photography into his collection: the celebrity portraits as well as the self-portraits, the erotic photos as well as the flowers.

Image

Another look in the spring 2017 show.CreditChris Warde-Jones for The New York Times

Much of the initial goggling and giggling was over the explicitly erotic pieces, but the show had the scope of a complete catalog. Many of the most famous photos were here: portraits of Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Robert Sherman and Alice Neel; Mapplethorpe’s leather-gloved hand from the invitation to a major exhibition; the flowers; the classical statuary. It had been an undertaking, Mr. Simons said, to reach out to the sitters to secure permission to use their likenesses. Mr. Sherman, handsome and gleamingly bald, attended the show, as did the family of Ms. Neel, who died in 1984.

That palpable sense of connection freed the Mapplethorpe works from the static confines of a gallery retrospective, just as Mr. Simons’s own archive, unpedestaled, peopled the crowd. One provocateur and innovator saluted another: Looking at Mr. Simons’s work and Mapplethorpe’s, it was striking to see once again how influential each has been, and to recognize the debt contemporary men’s wear owes to Mr. Simons, and photography to Mapplethorpe.

That the work is so well known was the peculiar challenge of using it. “I wasn’t interested to choose five photographs and put them on T-shirts — that’s what everyone does,” Mr. Simons said. And in fact, as of very recently, you could buy at Uniqlo a T-shirt with the same American flag image Mr. Simons used. What was once astonishing is now canonical.

Image

Backstage before the show; Mapplethorpe photographs are taped to the wall.CreditChris Warde-Jones for The New York Times

That made for a quieter collection than usual for Mr. Simons, even if he called it “probably the most complex collection I ever did, technically speaking,” thanks to the challenges of printing the images at high quality on cloth. The clothes were simpler, riffing on Raf shapes of the past: tunics and big coats, threadbare sweaters, abbreviated pullover vests. The models looked like Mapplethorpe (down to the leather-man hats on their curly heads) and were dressed like his portraits of Ms. Smith, in her plain black trousers and men’s shirt. The looks repeated, with variations; the boys became frames for the images they wore.

But there was something darkly sensual about the way their sweaters, partially unbuttoned, gaped open, or their oversize shirts caught air and filled like sails as they marched by. Many models had to pull them back on as they finished their turn around the runway: the collection undressed them as much as it dressed them. It’s not hard to imagine Mapplethorpe appreciating that detail.

At the end of the show, the crowd converged on Mr. Simons, offering congratulations and gasping about the bluer bits. Then the audience departed and, as quiet settled back over the space, the mannequins did, too: Crews appeared to disassemble them and pack the outfits away, back to the archive.

Off they went. Mr. Simons isn’t one to dwell on his own history. Among the 266 mannequins was one in a jacket inscribed with the legend of his fall 2015 collection, a forward-charging rallying cry: “To the Archives, No Longer Relevant.”